Wholesome, small-town life is what Shelley Shepard Gray does best in her fiction, including in her Amish-themed titles (Her Only Wish) and her contemporary romances (the Rumors in Ross County series). In Moving Forward, the second installment in her tenderly drawn Woodland Park Firefighters series, she introduces readers to an immensely likable cast of characters with lives unsettled by past personal trauma.
The novel starts in Woodland Park, Colo., when a fire erupts at the garden center owned by Kristen Werner. Kristen, originally from Houston, Tex., is a successful local businesswoman whose romantic life--and wedding plans--came to a screeching halt after her fiancé learned she couldn't have children. Kristen suffers from pulmonary arterial hypertension. When new-in-town, hunky firefighter Greg Tebo, a former army officer with PTSD who served 12 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, arrives with the fire crew to tend to the garden shop blaze, Kristen faints. Greg, a transplant to Colorado from West Virginia, is instantly smitten with Kristen. He checks up on her at the hospital the next day, and the two begin a friendship that sparks romantic feelings. But are Kristen and Greg willing to put their troubled pasts behind them, trust each other, and rekindle love in their lives?
Moving Forward is an emotionally dramatic, gentle romance of ordinary people healing their wounded hearts in a close-knit community. Readers will be eager for the next entry in this hopeful, heartfelt series. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines